Want more traffic to your site? Try Facebook’s built-in video CTA

We all know that calls-to-action (CTAs) are an important part of social video. What do you want your viewers to do next? Share your video? Follow your page? Go to your website? A CTA is a great way to prompt your audience’s next step.

While CTAs are good for all kinds of actions, as noted, they are especially critical for publishers who want to drive traffic back to their own websites. A CTA designed with this goal is, naturally, much more effective if your viewer can simply click on the prompt. There was a time when clickable CTAs were not available on Facebook, but those times have changed. However, we’ve noticed that a lot of publishers don’t seem to be taking advantage of this incredibly useful feature.

Facebook now allows you to easily add a clickable CTA to any videos you natively upload. While uploading (or editing an uploaded video), you can add a click-through CTA in the “Basic” tab. Have a look:

Your Guide to Social Video

As you can see, Facebook makes it very simple to insert a CTA directing to a URL of your choice. You can choose from their list of designated CTA text, such as “Learn More” and supplement it with a short link description, if you so choose.

If you publish a video that is tied to an article on your own site, this is a great opportunity to link through to it. If you host long-form video content on your site, you might tease it with a short Facebook video, and a CTA such as this allows you to direct your viewers immediately to the full piece.

Even if there isn’t a specific piece of associated content to link them to, including a click-through CTA to your home page is never a bad idea. It’s only going to drive more traffic to your site. It’s time to start including them on every video you upload to Facebook!